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A short introduction
Morphology
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwwyhndrobwllllantysiligogogoch
(a town name in Wales)
How is it that we can use and understand words in our language that we have never encountered before?
Morphology: Background and Basic Terms
Morphology :
the component of a grammar that deals with the internal structure of
words.
Morphology: Background and Basic Terms (2)
Adjectives are abstract; they are not real forms. The real forms that represents them (in-,-s, and –ful) are therefore usually called morphs. (Hocket,1947)
Morphology: Background and Basic Terms (3)
Words Morphs Morphemes
watched watch-ed WATCH+PAST
pens pen-s PEN+PLURAL
unhelpful un-help-ful NEGATIVE+HELP+ADJECTIVE
• Type of investigation which analyzes all those basic “elements” which are used in language elements= linguistic message (morphemes). (Yule:1985)
• The study of forms of words (Matthews:1979)
• While syntax is concerned with how words arrange themselves into constructions, morphology is concerned with the forms of words themselves. (Malmkjaer:1991)
Definition
A word need not have any special phonetic properties: some words bear stress but
others do not, some words set off by intonational signals but
others are not.
a door - adore
The Minimal Meaningful Units of Language(Words Versus Morphemes)
Tone languages: a language is said to have tone when differences in word meaning are signaled by differences in pitch
H
[ma] ‘mother’ High tone
H
[ma] ‘hemp’ Low rise
[ma] ‘horse’ Fall rise
[ma] ‘scold’ High fall
L
HLM
LH
(a) The hunters pursued the bear.
(b) The bear was pursued by the hunters.
A word is a minimal free form
• Words, though they may be definable as minimal free forms, are not minimal meaningful units of language.
• The word hunters can stand alone (a free form), nonetheless consists of three meaningful parts : hunt, er, and s. (Morphemes).
• The minimal meaningful units of language ARE NOT words, but arbitrary signs or MORPHEMES.
• A minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function (Yule:1985)
• The smallest linguistic unit that has meaning (Johnson & Johnson:1999)
• The elementary particle of lexicogrammar, the thing out of which words are built (Halliday:2004).
• The smallest meaningful unit in a language. A morpheme cannot be divided without altering or destroying its meaning. For example, the English word kind is a morpheme. If the d is removed, it changes to kin, which has a different meaning. (Richard & Schmidt:2002)
Morpheme
One Morphe
me
Two Three More than three
and
boy boy-s
hunt hunt-er hunt-er-s
hospital hospital-ize
hospital-iz-ation
Hospital-iz-ation-s
gentle gentle-man
gentle-man-ly
gentle-man-li-ness
Morphological Description: Elements of Morphology (Yule)
Morphemes
free
bound
lexical
functional
derivational
inflectional
Yule:1985
• Free: A form which can be used on its own : Betty, horse, red, write, love, drive
• Bound: a linguistic form (a MORPHEME) which is never used alone but must be used with another morpheme, e.g. as an AFFIX or COMBINING FORM. For example, the English suffix -ing must be used with a verb stem: writing, loving, driving. (Richard & Schmidt:2002)
Free and Bound Morphemes
Bound Morphemes : Derivational Morphemes
• used to make new words in the language and different grammatical category from the stem. The derivational morphemes -ness changes the adjective good to the noun goodness.
[[good](Adj) ness] N
Bound Morphemes : Inflectional Morphemes
• are not used to make new words in the language , but rather to indicate aspects of the grammatical function of a word• Plural/Singular, tense, comparative/possessive form• English : All inflectional morphemes are suffixes.
Bound Morphemes
Bound
Derivational Inflectional
Suffix and prefix
Suffix
Plural/Singular, tense, comparative/possessive
form
New words
Free Morphemes
Free
lexical functional
Ordinary nouns, adjectives, verbs
Conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns.
The boy -’s wild -ness(functional)
(lexical)
(inflectional)
(Lexical) (derivational)
shock -ed the teach -er -s(Lexical) (inflec
tional)
(functional)
(Lexical) (derivational)
(inflectional)
The elements of morphology: The boy’s wildness shocked the teachers.
Morphological Description: Elements of Morphology (Bauer)
Morphology
inflection
word-formation
derivation
composition/compounding
Bauer:1983
• Two or more words combine into a morphological unit (Marchand:1969)
• The combination of two free forms or words that have an otherwise independent existence. (Adams:1979)
Word-formation:Composition/ Compounding
N+N V+N N+V Adjective+N
Particle+N
V+
Particle
Phrase compoun
ds
football pickpocket, killjoy
nosebleed, moonshine
software, slowcoach
in-crowd, aftertaste
clawback, dropout
gin-and-tonic, forget-me-not
• Backformation: occurs when suffix is removed from a complex word (liaison – to liaise)
• Blend: where normally initial and terminal segments of two words are joined together to create a new word: brunch (breakfast +lunch), chunnel (channel+tunnel), fantabulous (fantastic+fabulous).
• Acronyms : words formed from the initial letters of a fixed phrase or title : SALT (strategic arms limitation talks), misty (more ideologically sound than you).
Word-formation:Other word-formation types
• Any of the different forms of a MORPHEME
• For example, in English the plural morpheme is often shown in writing by adding -s to the end of a word, e.g. cat /kæt/ – cats /kæts/. Sometimes this plural morpheme is pronounced /z/, e.g. dog /dig/ – dogs /digz/, and sometimes it is pronounced /Iz/, e.g. class /kleNs/ – classes /`kleNsız/. /s/, /z/, and /Iz/ all have the same grammatical function in these examples, they all show plural; they are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme.
Allomorph
The structure of the entire word may be represented by means of either a set of labeled brackets or a tree diagram.
Word Structure
[[[hospital]Nize] ed]V V V
V Af
N Af
hospital
iz ed
1. Draw the appropriate tree structure for each of these words:
a) unhappiness c) fearlessly
b) denationalization d) pre-viewer
2. What are the functional morphemes in the following sentences:
The old man sat on a chair and told them tales of the woe
3. What are the inflectional morphemes in the following phrases:
a) the teacher’s books b) the newest model
Discussion